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Comment by simonsarris | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps I am naive but this conversation seems easy to resolve with just a few words. Can anyone tell me how a client would respond to this:

You can have a site with newer, nicer features, or you can have a site that supports older browsers. If you want both then you are commissioning two distinct websites. If you want usage statistics for old browsers I have them, and if you want to be economical I can produce the second website for older browsers at a reduced cost with reduced flair, after all only X% of people would see that site and it would still look reasonable, just not amazing. What would you like to do?

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To me that's lying to them.

While supporting IE6 is onerous extra work, it's still work that can be done and has little impact on the final product.

Take the other position, that 'Not supporting IE6 will mean I'll charge you 70% of my original quote, only x% of people use it in your target market' or better add it as an extra in the quote in the first place as the article suggests.

Then it's up to them, it's a risk assessment. But be up front in your quotes with it, not an after the quote is won 'I don't know how to do it!'.

The article's incredibly OTT on how much adding IE6 support costs, but I certainly would never go down the route of lying to a customer about it. If he charges double it's probably because he hates doing it and fair game to him.

>and has little impact on the final product.

Depends on the tools you use, etc. It very well may double the time required (as IE 6 support requires tons of testing of all the features, and many software project have huge portions of the projects being testing, not development).

Additionally, you tend to need more experienced engineers, IE6 support is aged out of the current crop of grads.

I think the second legacy browser site is a great solution. Additionally, I think if you're saying "has little impact on the final product", you're not working with clients who open up psds and count pixels on you. Some people are.

I think the article is realistic in terms of IE6 support costs if you're not just building a simple website.

Trying to build a responsive, dynamic webapp, that is identical in IE6 to a modern browser can easily add a lot of time. Just as an example, producing all the graphics for rounded corners, rather than being able to do them in CSS.

I've found that people don't really notice or care when IE shows them square corners.

The thing about IE6/7 support is that it's a complete known quantity at this point. The problems & workarounds are well documented. There's tons of experienced HTML coders out there that know IE backwards and forwards. CSS frameworks like OOCSS include built-in workarounds.

So if IE support doubles the cost, it must either be something very complex, or a real nickle-and-dime project. (Either that or the webdev doesn't really what they're doing.)

That's not just an IE6 problem. IE8 has full CSS 2.1 support but can't do css3 rounded corners, opacity, or shadows. You can sometimes fake it with -ms-filter and CSS expressions (htc files) but those work just as well on 6 and 7.

That said, I'm happy to drop IE 6 where not required by the client - 8 may not have html5 or CSS 3 features, but at least it's relatively bug free.

Rounded corners are already out fashioned. If a client want IE6 support I take it as a good challenge, and do something nice under this heavy constraint. I'll tell them upfront that they won't have cheap drag and drop and that new stuff.

Minor nitpick, but the OP is a she - Lea Verou. To be fair, this feels like such a male-dominated sector that I only picked you up because I had unexpectedly noticed Lea's picture at the bottom of the article, and I suspect you didn't feel the need to check!

If we had genderless pronouns we wouldn't have to care about details like that which don't materially affect the article or its criticisms.

Having said that, fields with a more even gender ratio have had to deal with this for a while - what do they do?

English does have a genderless singular pronoun: They

Just because a book said it was preferred in 1848 to use he when sex is indeterminate (then went on to use both singular he and singular they) doesn't mean that's true today.

The language always used both. Why stop today? Might feel a bit odd at first if you're not used to it, but it's not a bit different than how singular "you" is used ("You are coming today?" uses the plural form of "be").

The book itself used both forms! Shows you that English teachers may have been overly strict with you in the past.

Some more on the topic:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they

"You" started out plural. "Thou" was the singular version. Then "you" started being a form of respect, similar to the royal "we" or the Spanish "usted". Finally, we all became "you"s, sort of how we all became "sirs and madams" and "ladies and gentlemen" when those were originally a select class.

Anyway, "They" has been undergoing this process for a few centuries now, and I concur that it's time to embrace it.

>Thackeray's use of both forms demonstrates. "The alternative to the masculine generic with the longest and most distinguished history in English is the third-person plural pronoun. Recognized writers have used they, them, themselves, and their to refer to singular nouns such as one, a person, an individual, and each since the 1300s."

I don't really think it's an evolution, as much as the mid1800's tendency to over classify and striate things going away.

It surprises me that this has to be highlighted. I wouldn't genuinely know if it's a difference between British and American English but I've never encountered a British trend of using gender specific pronouns - or the unilateral usage of feminine pronouns in favour of masculine ones - in place of the neutral forms.

It is one of those niggles that irks my pedantic self though; particularly the politically correct change to using 'she' instead of 'he' (instead of the perfectly neutral 'they', and even 'one').

Does the singular You bother you? Dost thou pine for Thou?

I'm not sure what relevance that has to my dislike of unnecessarily gender specific pronouns.

I misunderstood the antecedent to your "this"

Thank you for this. I had always (only slightly, though, in a grammar nazi way) looked down on people who used "they" for a singular pronoun because I thought that many do so just out of carelessness. But glad there is a formalized reasoning for it.

I've always used "he/she". But that's not quite accurate (or elegant) either.

I tend to just be lazy and put "the OP" instead of he/she/it, although you could nitpick me on that as well since the author of an article posted to HN is often not the "original poster" in question.

"OP" roughly meaning: "walk up the comment tree, including comments and authors, all the way to the article and whoever submitted it, stop at the one I'm talking about, which should be pretty clear from the context of what I'm saying".

At least in theory, "OP" means "original poster", making it unambiguous. Though sometimes people mean the root of a comment thread, rather than the article.

Not to navigate off-topic, but merely as an aside, perhaps we can solicit the W3C to weigh in with guidance for <op>.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-neutral_pronoun#Summary

This point of view stands so long as the client hasn't heard something else from another vendor. New clients (the ones you'd have to explain this to) are often trying to avoid Caveat emptor situations. These IE development conversations are rarely one-way, regardless of how you sell it.

If they want fancy new features, just use Modernizr with a polyfill. That generally seems like a better solution for the dwindling population of legacy browser users than creating a completely different codebase.

You are still creating another site even when using polyfills. The surface area for display bugs in a polyfill is > 0.

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